


Shelter From the Storm

by BlindSwandive



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Hallucinations, Hell Trauma, References to starvation and captivity, disturbing imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-14
Updated: 2019-11-14
Packaged: 2021-01-30 21:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21434989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlindSwandive/pseuds/BlindSwandive
Summary: With no leads on Amara or Lucifer, Sam and Dean are in a holding pattern.  So after defeating the Soul Eater in Michigan, they head to Goodlettsville, TN to take out the Soul Eater that Bobby had trapped but not killed there years earlier.  They find it harder than they expected.Timeline note: set immediately after "Safe House" (11.16) and before "Red Meat" (11.17)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22
Collections: Supernatural Summergen 2019





	Shelter From the Storm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amberdreams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amberdreams/gifts).

> Written for the wonderful Amberdreams1960's prompts: "Lost in the Shadowlands" and "I come in from the wilderness/ a creature void of form/ "Come in" she said, "I'll give you/ shelter from the storm" (Bob Dylan). Beta'd by the amazing Alyndra and Nwspaprtaxis who have 100% saved me from myself.

_Jar of blood in hand, Sam paints the sigil on the wall that will help kill the Soul Eater and destroy its nest. Dean's body lies lifeless behind him on the floor; Dean's spirit is inside the monster's nest, inside the terrible, timeless shadowland where it keeps its victims, slowly devouring their souls. _

_Sam hates that he's there, but one of them needs to be—the creature can only be defeated if the symbol is painted in the solid world and its shadow both. One sigil sets the table; the other kills the thing and purges the hive, freeing all the souls trapped inside with it. If Bobby's notes from that other case in Tennessee from way back when are right, things will start to get hairy very soon, when it knows it's in danger._

_It's an ugly risk, but there is a child in a coma that can maybe still be saved, if they work fast enough—if they can get through this without winding up dinner for the monster themselves. Her mother is comatose in the bed beside her. Another few hours and they may both be too far gone, bodies beyond saving. It's happened here before, too many times. Sam can only imagine how many withered spirits are trapped in this place, the rations the Soul Eater keeps to feed on in lean times, when fresh meat is hard to find. He can only imagine how many are still trapped in the nest in Tennessee; Bobby had only known how to seal the nest, not how to burn it down. _

_An old hunter that Sam has never met is still trapped there. Harvey's organs were shutting down when Bobby came along, and he was past saving. Sam decides then and there that if they make it out of here—it is always an "if"—he'll convince Dean to drive down to Tennessee, to tie up loose ends. To put Harvey to rest. To finish what Bobby started._

_It's the least they can do. Bobby has been gone for three years, but the wound still aches whenever he slows down long enough to look at it. _

_Any anyway, until they get a lead on Amara, or a tip on where Lucifer has taken Cass's body, or anything at all that could help them defeat the Darkness threatening to destroy them all—to swallow every soul faster than any Soul Eater ever could—what else can they do?_

_Sam is close to finishing the sigil, checking it against his diagram, when he feels something move behind him, the hairs prickling on the back of his neck._

_Dean is behind him, but he's—not Dean. His eyes are filmed over and his voice is wrong._

_Apparently Soul Eaters can possess their victims' bodies. As Dean's fist smashes into Sam's jaw, he makes a mental note to add that to the lore._

_"Just come with me into the nest," it says, soft, with Dean's mouth. "I can keep you safe from the Darkness. Your brother wants to go to her—he **needs** to go to her. But I can keep you safe. Forever."_

"Sam."

_...Forever..._

"Earth to Sam."

Sam rubbed his face, clawing out from under the haze of half-sleep with the Soul Eater's words still sloshing sea-sick through his head. "What?" His tongue felt sticky, dry and sour with the adrenaline of the nightmare still on him.

"Said we're here. House of a Thousand Corpses."

Oh. Sam hadn't noticed the car had stopped moving. He swallowed thickly and stretched, tried to buy time. "How do you want to play it?"

"Nothing to play. Place is abandoned," Dean said, gesturing vaguely behind them toward a "For Sale" sign that was swaying slowly in the breeze back by the road. "No cars, boarded-up windows. No clue how many people must've fell into comas here before folks gave up on grabbing at the real estate."

Sam nodded slowly. The Goodlettsville property was a big place, rambling, with a beautiful old brick house, a barn, a shed, even a field of overgrown grapes and what looked like the edges of an orchard, blooming in spite of the neglect. A place like this wouldn't sit ignored without a hell of a bad reputation.

"You ready?" Dean asked. 

Sam peered at him out of the corner of his eye. Dean's face was carefully neutral, but his voice sounded just a little tight. Gruff and raw. "Are you?"

Dean scoffed. "Yeah, man, wanna get this over with, get back to the important shit. Amara. Getting Cass back from that dickwad archangel." It was the same song he'd been singing all week, and he always managed to make it sound like a scolding—like Sam could forget what was at stake—but they hadn't had any new leads, and there was nothing to be gained by sitting and stewing in their own self-pity. So Sam ignored him, tried to pop a crick out of his neck.

"All right," he agreed, sighing, and Dean clapped him on the shoulder, clambering out.

Sam hung back to watch him.

_"He **needs** to go to her."_

Sam unfolded himself from the Impala slowly. If it hadn't come from his brother's lips, in his brother's voice, maybe it wouldn't be gnawing at him like this, but... but some part of him wondered if Dean _would_ go to her, _would_ be lost forever, swallowed whole and left some soulless shell. And some tiny, awful part of him that he hated wondered if leaving Dean in a coma with a Soul Eater feeding on him—just until Sam could find a way to fix it, to banish the Darkness for good—wouldn't be the safest thing for him.

Guilt rose in his belly, left him half-nauseous. 

"You're, uh... you're right," he said, instead. “You went in as bait last time, guess it's only fair it's my turn." 

Better to quash the temptation before it could grow into anything more than that. Saving Dean behind his back wasn't working out so hot for him, lately, after all. With his luck, Dean would be trapped with the Soul Eater forever, or Sam would somehow unleash some even bigger, badder ancient evil, if such a thing could even exist.

Dean just grunted. "Dude, that's what I've been telling you for a thousand miles, you only getting it now?" 

Sam shrugged, tried to look sheepish. He hoped the guilt passed for that well enough. Dean looked mollified, so he supposed it had worked.

"Let's take a look around the grounds, first," Sam suggested, not sure he was quite ready to go into some awful shadowland and be faced with the image of Dean lying bloody on the ground. Again. Not this close on the heels of sleep. That was the kind of thing the Soul Eater liked to do; show you images of your loved ones dead to weaken you, to soften your soul up for the feeding. "Just in case there's some random groundskeeper hanging around," he tried.

"Fine, fine," Dean agreed, impatient. "I'll take the barn, you take the shed."

Sam nodded and took off to clear his head inside the rickety walls of an old garden shed.

Which might have been fine, if the Soul Eater's nest had been confined to the house.

• • •

"Dean!" Sam tried shouting for what he was sure was the thousandth time. While the barn wasn't too far away from the shed in the real world, it was very clear that sound didn't carry beyond the nest. Which was where he was pretty sure he was.

One moment he was poking through the mess of abandoned tools, and the next he was falling, landing hard in this bizarrely empty shell of the shed he'd been standing in. There were no tools, here, no boxes, no cobwebs or scuttling sounds of mice—just walls and a dimness that made every detail a little vague.

"Would have been nice to know the nest was in the shed and not the house, Bobby," Sam muttered to a wall. He'd just have to hope Dean would figure it out soon and get to painting it on the outside. 

Sam had been planning on marking the sigil on his arm and nicking his palm before heading into the house, but that plan was shot to hell now. He wondered whether he'd be able to remember the sigil correctly when he started smearing it on the wall; wondered when the other souls would become visible to him, and how many there would be; wondered how exactly Dean had made himself bleed in a shadow-world with no furniture and no objects to be seen. He didn't even think he'd be able to pry loose a big enough shadow-splinter to jam into his palm.

He hoped his teeth remembered how to be sharp.

"Fuck my life," Sam mumbled, and rolled up his sleeves.

• • •

"Sammy!" Dean shouted, for what was at least the millionth time. "It's in the goddamn barn, not the house!"

_Shit._ Even his soul's throat was hoarse, now. That didn't even make any sense; his real body wasn't doing shit, why should his throat hurt?

Then again. By that logic he shouldn't have been able to feel pain in Hell, either, and he knew all too well how that went.

"Fuck magic," he announced to no one, and rolled up his sleeves.

Dean had been idly peeking around the barn for anything of interest, more to buy Sam time to get his head in the game (_groundskeeper my ass_) than anything else. He'd just picked up a rake that was more rust than steel when a pain like ice and burning shot through his ankle, and he'd landed on his face in a dim Other Place for the second time in a week. "Sonofabitch," he'd shouted at the Soul Eater, wherever it was hiding, but if it noticed, it didn't turn back up to say so. So he'd picked himself back up and started for the doors.

The doors, for the record, did open.

They just opened onto nothing.

Dean's brain had processed the nothing into color, into burnt orange and smoke and blood and gunmetal, but it wasn't something _real_, wasn't something he could focus his eyes on or press his body—his soul's shape, anyway—through. When he tried stepping out into it, it felt like falling, like an endless sickening lurch, until he reached back behind himself, desperate, with shaking fingers for the edges of the doorway and found it no further away than it had been. He pulled himself back a few inches and the staticky nothingness closed up as though he'd never tried to part it.

He could have sworn he'd glimpsed a hook swinging from a rusted chain, slow and threatening, in the distance.

He'd closed the door after that and pretended it hadn't shaken him down to his boots.

Dean had paced the edges of the barn, shouted for Sam like it would make a lick of difference, waited for souls to appear—it had taken a while, in Michigan, like his brain had needed to adjust to the idea before it could stand to see them. Sam wouldn't hear him from outside, the rational part of his brain knew that, but what else was there to do but hope Sam came and found his body?

He paced back to where he'd fallen, hoping Sam would assume he'd get to work there and would make his own mark on the complementary wall. It would be his own best guess if it were him finding Sam's body on the ground. 

As if called into being by the thought, Sam materialized below him, pale and bloodied, and Dean screwed his eyes shut, willing the nightmare away. When he stepped toward the wall, through the place the Not-Sam should have been, there was no resistance. So he pulled the knife from his back pocket—he expected it to be there, just like the last time, as real and solid to him as his clothing, as familiar as his own bones—and made a clean, deep cut along the back of his forearm. 

"Better be coming to get me, Sam," he muttered, and opened his eyes on the wall. 

The ghost of the sigil was still marked on the inside of his wrist from the nest in Grand Rapids, a little blurred by the ink bleeding from too much gas station soap, but clear enough to work from, even in the dimness. He kept his eyes fixed between his wrist and his work, not daring risk the distraction and weakness of another vision of Sam. He figured the withered spirits would start appearing any minute now, too, with their sickly pallor and blackened mouths, their eyes sinking and their hair thinning and their veins ugly and dark through their not-quite-solid-enough skin.

There had been things like them in Hell, too. Things that barely remembered how to be human-shaped, creatures made up of little but emptiness and suffering. There had been no mirrors, but Dean had wondered if he'd started to look like them, too, then. Hollow. Shells with fine cracks running through them, letting everything that made a person a person—that made them real—slowly seep out to be lost in the emptiness and what passed for earth beneath them.

_Eyes on the prize,_ Dean scolded himself, swallowing down at a nebulous nausea. No use feeding the thing for free.

By the time he was finishing the last curve of the circle, his eyes—his soul's eyes?—were blurring, like it was something they remembered they should be doing. He wondered suddenly if he was standing in his own body, somehow mucking through his own vision, but dismissed it, rubbing his eyes clear with the back of his wrist. Christ, he was even sweating, even though it felt more like a deep cellar in this strange un-place than a barn during a warm spring, close but cool and smelling of earth and age.

The sigil pulsed with a strange red glow when he finished it, its magic bringing it to life, then dulled into something faint, barely there.

Dean sat down to wait, leaning back against the wall and closing his eyes.

"Come on, Sammy," he said, softer than soft. "Come find me."

• • •

Sam banged his head—or where his head would be if he were wearing his body—into the wall of the Other Shed when the sigil failed to light up for the fifth or sixth time. He knew he was close, but he was adding in small strokes, piece-by-piece, afraid to render the thing useless with an extraneous line. He wished he'd asked if the sigil inside the nest had lit up when it was finished the way it had in the corporeal world; he'd just assumed it would. He wished he'd memorized the thing on the ride, even though he had been more than half planning to send Dean into the nest again right up until he wasn't. He wished—he wished—

_"Shit in one hand and wish in the other,"_ their old man had said more times than Sam wanted to count, _"see which fills up first."_

He swallowed at the sour taste that left in his mouth, or what his soul remembered of a mouth and remembered of taste, anyway. You didn't need to really have a mouth anymore for your spirit to go right on pretending you did. The habits of the body were strong enough to survive even when the body was long gone; he'd learned that in the Cage, decade after decade after decade.

"Better be out there, Dean," Sam whispered to the wall, cautiously extending the edges of the V that cut through the center of the circle. 

A glow that belonged in a cave, accidental to the evolution of some strange, sightless creature, swelled and died over the sigil, and Sam breathed out relief. He'd gotten it right.

Time meant nothing here, if the lore was right—it existed somehow outside of time and space—but when what seemed like twenty minutes had passed with no sign of Dean, Sam's relief started to dry up, twisting into unease.

Something was wrong. Something _must_ be wrong.

Where was Dean? Where was the angry fallout of the sigils being worked in tandem? And for that matter, where were the withered souls? Did they eventually fade away completely, if a Soul Eater was desperate enough to finish them off? And where were the visions he'd heard about? Even if the creature was weak from hunger, it had been strong enough to pull him inside, and the shaky trembling in his gut made Sam sure he was being fed off of.

The worry gnawed at him until he gave up on waiting and started prowling.

The shed wasn't very big, even if it looked a lot larger empty than it had filled with the odd assortment of old tools and boxes and tarps of the corporeal world. He thought if he laid down and stretched his arms out, he could probably span the length with his body. Still, when Sam tried to focus on its edges, they seemed to recede, sliding away from his reach like a skulking cat that didn't want to be pet. The effect was vaguely nauseating; the walls somehow kept the impression of being straight and solid and unbending but seemed to drift further away whenever his gaze lingered, warping impossibly.

It made his head ache until he gave in and closed his eyes against the wrongness.

When the pain ebbed into the background, Sam took a deep breath and put one hand on the nearest wall. If he couldn't feel out the space with his eyes, he could at least circumnavigate it with the memory of his body.

With his fingertips anchoring him, the walls seemed to more or less behave, though they felt less substantial in places, giving like foam or cotton instead of the wood they pretended to be. He wondered if the nest was just so old it was starting to break down, too, being eaten away at like the souls trapped inside. He didn't know if there could really be an 'outside' to speak of, but when he let his touch linger over a gap between boards, it was like touching fog, cool and damp, like this box was just barely keeping out a world of mist and shadow and nothingness.

There was a tiny window set into one of the walls, too blocked with boxes and grimed over with filth and cobwebs in the real world to let in any light, and Sam paused there to peer out.

Into nothing.

_Nothing._ Not blackness. Not a blank television or a night too dark to see through. Just... nothing. His eyes slid away from the window in protest like they couldn't stand to look, couldn't bear the lack of data, and when he kept forcing them back, there was a stuttering there, a begrudging shifting into being, and the space outside turned slowly white, the white of mist and snowstorms and downy feathers, the white of an ice fog, of whiteout weather, of profound cold. 

_Lucifer cold,_ he thought, and then wished he hadn't.

_I did that,_ he scolded himself, _just my mind trying to cope with nothing. It's not real. Not there._

But even repeating the reassurances in his mind, and finally out loud, he still felt weaker than he had when he'd been sucked into this place.

Fat white flakes of snow began to drift from the ceiling. Or maybe it was the fine down shaken loose from the underside of endless eldritch wings as they unfolded, stretched out into infinity, ineffably immense.

Sam's breath started to come out in white puffs, freezing on the air. He closed his eyes and shouted for Dean.

• • •

A creak finally made Dean lift his head. For a moment he saw Sam hanging from the rafters, twisting slowly, but he forced his eyes low, to the ground, toward the real source of the sound. Over in the far corner, somehow deeper in shadow, there was a slow blur, and something too pale seemed to be coming out of the earth.

One of the withered spirits. 

"Took you long enough," Dean muttered. He got up, brushing off the seat of his jeans before he could remember that his jeans weren't even real, and started over toward the spirit. Maybe there wouldn't be anything left to it to talk to, at this point, but what else did he have to do?

He kept his head down, but Sam's legs were still swinging in his peripheral vision. This time he took a wide path around them; even if they weren't real, he didn't particularly want to put his face through them.

Dean squinted to get a look at the spirit. What it had been in life was hard to tell, now. It was small, maybe a teen or just scrawny, but so faint he could see clear through it in places: a hole where its chest should be, an arm that ended in a blur below the elbow, an eye socket full of darkness instead of an eye. 

"Hey," he tried quietly, not wanting to spook it. But if it could hear him at all, it didn't look up.

It was sitting on the ground. Or more like _in_ the ground, legs half-visible below the knee where they passed through a spot in the barn floor that was a little darker than the rest. Its feet were swinging back and forth slowly, like Sam's had been behind him.

Dean stared. It didn't remember how to have entire parts of its body, but it remembered how to swing its feet, like a child sitting at the end of a dock with its feet dangling in the water. Its head was canted down, like it was watching them sway.

"Can I join you?" he asked gently, before sitting, though he didn't think it knew he was there, not in any way that mattered. But it was so small... Something inside Dean hurt to see it.

He wondered, when they killed the Soul Eater, what would be left of this creature for Heaven. Part of him hoped it'd fill out, turn back into a real person, magically stitched together. Maybe it'd be sitting on a dock in heaven, this time tomorrow, tadpoles nibbling around its toes in whatever creek had been its favorite in life.

Most of him didn't put enough faith in heaven for that, these days.

"I'm sorry, kid," he said, reaching out to pat it on the shoulder, but his fingers slipped past its edges into something watery, and he withdrew them with a jerk.

It never looked up.

Dean looked down, too, then, rubbing his fingers, and frowned.

The spirit's legs were passing _through_ the floor, and into something—else. When Dean squinted, he thought he could just make out the shadow of a wooden square set into a frame in the dirt. Out in the real world, the barn floor was too thick with dust and rotted hay, but in this shadow place he could see it: a trap door leading below, connecting this space to something else. When he pressed his palm carefully onto the door, it slipped through the same as it had through the spirit, as easily as parting water.

"Sonofabitch."

The nest was bigger than they thought.

• • •

The Soul Eater's nest was learning, Sam decided. The creature was pulling out all the stops for him, probably starved from too few new souls coming into its lair, and Sam was trudging back and forth through a whiteout snowstorm so dense he couldn't even make out the walls of the shed anymore. The cold wasn't real, and he knew that, tried to keep it fixed in his mind, but it still got inside of him somehow and pretty soon he was shivering badly, arms wrapped around his chest. He'd started pacing to generate pretend warmth to combat the false cold.

The drifts were up to his knees, obscuring the ground completely, so when his feet found the place in the floor that wasn't a floor, he fell through like a stone. It wasn't until he looked up at where he'd been that he could see the ghost of the trapdoor above him.

Sam had landed in a tunnel, and he knew it should be pitch black inside, with no lights or openings and the trapdoor closed above, but it was filled with the same dimness as the shed had been when he'd first been sucked through into the shadowland that lay beneath it. He could just make out the red clay dirt endemic to this part of the country through the hodgepodge of brick and wood shoring up the crude walls and ceiling, but it was all washed out and faint, a dream of itself. He couldn't see the end or any turns from here, but he could guess where it was headed.

"Shit," he muttered, rubbing his face. The nest _was_ in the house. It was just here, too.

He'd done what he could do from inside the shed, painted his sigil, but if Dean was off setting things up in the house, instead, Sam figured he should be prepared to paint there, too. Here, the ceiling was too low to stand up straight, so he stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets, hunched low, and set out to find it, ready to paint the symbol again as many times as he had to. Blood loss shouldn't be a problem here, after all.

His fingers brushed over the idea of something, there in his pocket, small and hard and pronged. He'd been spending so much time lately unconsciously squeezing it in his fist that it shouldn't have surprised him to find it, maybe, but he still closed his eyes, paused mid-step, and gripped it in his hand like a talisman against evil. For all the tangled feelings he'd wrapped around the little amulet over the years, it still meant _Dean_ to him first and foremost, still meant _family_ and _home_ and _love,_ always _love._

_Dean is up at the house,_ he told himself, repeated it like a mantra, a ward. _Dean is coming and Dean will paint the sigil on the outside and Dean will get me out._

• • •

"Should at least be a ladder," Dean muttered, while he awkwardly lowered himself through the trapdoor. He was pretty sure he could make out the ground below, and anyway it wasn't like he'd twist his knee if he landed wrong, but knowing what was under him would have gone a long way toward easing his mind. He finally let out a long, slow breath, closed his eyes, and dropped.

He didn't feel the landing, but he felt himself stop falling, and he opened his eyes fast, reaching out to grip the nearest wall to reassure himself he wasn't back out in the nothingness.

"I hate this place," he told no one, then banged the side of his fist over a greyish plank of wood. "You hear me?" he hollered. "I hate you!"

Nothing seemed to pay him any mind.

"This better be leading to the house," he grumbled, anyway, and set off down the tunnel, prickling. Sam was going to be worrying, and it was personally, deeply offensive that anything should be contriving to worry his little brother; Dean devoted a lot of energy even in the mellowest of times to avoiding that, if he could manage it. And Sam had already been chewing on something when they'd arrived, whatever it was. Lucifer; the Darkness; God; there were certainly enough pits of guilt and doubt and responsibility for them to wallow in, these days.

Add in the rotting souls of children and the threat of the end of the world hanging over them —again—and Dean was wishing hard for a bottle and something to hit. His mood was darkening, and he'd gone thirty yards before he realized it seemed to be taking the tunnel with it. 

The dim was deepening around him by degrees. First, back mold came spreading along the walls, and Dean had a hand halfway to his shirt collar before he remembered he couldn't actually inhale any spores. But further in, the patches thickened, bulging gradually out into vines, and then into briars and thorns, dripping with tar and stretching out along the path before him. By the time he'd gone another ten yards, the walls were almost invisible through the brambles, and a black mist, too reminiscent of Amara, began to seep down toward him from above.

And because there was no one there to catch him doing it, Dean ran.

• • •

The floor of the tunnel finally canted down enough for there to be enough room for Sam to straighten, so he paused to stretch, to unkink, whatever that meant in a place like this. He didn't stay long; a white mist was beginning to pool around his ankles and he didn't want to wait and find out how far it would rise. He thought the whole place should smell like a fog machine or a humidifier, full of stale and damp, but he could only pick out the earthy, metallic hint of clay, wondered if that was a trick of his mind. Still, he'd take it over the cold smell of snow and the warm, cloying stench of feathers that he'd left behind in the shed.

Sam thought he must be getting closer to the house when he began to see the spirits. He tried to take comfort in the progress, because the sight of them hit him hard where he was softest.

The lore had described them as withered, diminished by feeding, but Sam hadn't been prepared for this. The man who was slumped over against the wall of the tunnel was emaciated, looked too thin to survive, glassy eyed and slack-jawed. His skin, such as it was, was hard to pick out against the wall, like he had lain so long in clay and brick and weathered wood that he'd started to become one with them. His clothing had rotted away into moldering scrap. 

He was everything Sam imagined when he heard the words _kidnapped, starved, forgotten._ He was the kind of hunger so profound you stopped being able to feel it, where your body ate itself to survive, until there was nothing left to eat.

Sam wanted to gather the spirit up in his arms, to take him somewhere safe, to not leave him alone here, but there was nowhere safer to be.

"We'll get you out of here," he promised, instead, earnest and soft. "Help you rest."

The man didn't answer, and his glassy eyes showed no sign of recognition, so Sam ducked his head, stuffed his hands back in his jacket pockets, and walked on. He worked his thumb over a spot where the metal of the amulet was worn smooth, a slow ritual of self-soothing, of grounding.

_Dean is going to get us out,_ he repeated. _Dean is in the house, painting the sigil, wondering why things aren't going haywire. We're all getting out of here today._

But then he came to a fork in the tunnel, and stared, peering down each leg.

The mist had kept slowly rising, while he walked, was now thick and swirling around his knees. Even as he watched, it began to spill slow as snow down along the new path, like it was Sam's fear made manifest spilling out ahead of him.

Maybe it was. 

Sam pictured the angle of the sun when they parked so he could place north, and then tried to lay his memory of the grounds, the house and its outbuildings over the paths around him. If he was headed toward the house—and he was pretty sure he was—then the new fork was leading back towards the barn. Where they thought the nest didn't reach. Where Sam had last seen Dean headed.

Sam's stomach dropped and the mist seemed to swell to meet it.

• • •

_Sleeping Beauty,_ Dean thought suddenly. That's what this felt like. Wasn't there a scene like this in the old Disney cartoon? A daring prince having to fight his way through the wild briars to save the princess? The brambles were so close and thick now that he wished he had a machete, and his progress was slowed from a run to a stumble as he tried to sidle through the tightening passage without getting shredded. The blue-black mist had clotted around the walls and floor now, too, and he tried not to breathe it in, even though it must be nothing, must be only a dream—

Dean stopped dead, staring at one of the poisonous-looking thorns in front of him.

It took pounding his fist into his own hip to key himself up for it, but Dean closed his eyes tight and raised his hand slowly through the space. 

He felt nothing until he reached brick.

"Yes!" he whispered, triumphant, and opened his eyes.

Dean expected the brambles to be gone and his way to be clear. So far, proving the thing was fake had been enough to melt it away. But not this time. Whether it was because he was nearer to the core of the nest—to the heart of where the thing roosted—or something else entirely, he opened his eyes onto thorns and smoke, and when he tried to move his arm, he found it trapped in the midst of the brambles. He cursed.

The sound didn't echo, absorbed by the mass.

Dean drew in a long, controlled breath, and let it out slow, closing his eyes again. He tried to picture the tunnel as it had been before, clear and empty, and after an uneasy moment, his hand fell back free to his side.

"Great," he muttered. "Yep."

So all he'd have to do to get through the tunnel without getting trapped in it or stabbed by thorns or drowned in mist would be to close his eyes and do it blind. And hope nothing was coming for him.

_Piece of cake._

• • •

Sam ran up the fork in the tunnel toward the barn as fast as he could. The white fog was up over his sternum, now, and the floor was slowly rising. At least he figured that meant he was getting close.

Something changed about the light, some barely perceptible lightening. "Dean?" he tried calling. There was no answer, but something was visible in the roof of the tunnel ahead, moving slow. "Dean!" Sam called again, and slowed, approaching cautiously.

Feet. There were feet dangling from the roof of the tunnel, mummy-thin, grey as the weathered wood they emerged from. This one was worse than the one he'd left in the other tunnel, skin so thin it was almost translucent where it was plastered in against bone. There must be almost nothing left to eat in this one.

"Hello?" Sam tried gently. The swaying didn't stop.

The ceiling was low enough that Sam could pull himself up, though he felt... _something_ dipping in and out of his chest and belly as he did. It reminded him of dipping his fingers in a slow-moving stream, only maybe this was more like the stream was dipping its fingers in him. 

He was pretty sure it was the spirit's feet still swinging as he hauled up alongside it, but he decided against looking down. He'd had enough of seeing someone's arm inside him up to the elbow to last him a lifetime or several.

The spirit didn't look up when it touched him, either. If it could feel him in its space, it made no sign.

Sam tried to look at it, once he was safely up inside the barn. It only seemed right—to acknowledge its suffering, to offer it the dignity of being seen—but there was so little left of it, so many places where the skin was gone, where bone showed through bleached and pale, where things were _missing_ and it didn't seem to be aware of him one way or another. So he mumbled an apology that felt insufficient, swallowed at the lump in his throat, and let himself look away, to search the barn for any sign of Dean, spirit or otherwise. 

It didn't take him long to find the sigil Dean had painted. He touched it, just to be sure it was there on the inside with him; just to be sure it was fresh. It looked mostly dry, but a tiny dot of the blood—whatever that meant in this place—came away on his finger.

He almost brushed it off, then wondered if it was a miniscule piece of Dean's soul he was holding in his hand, and couldn't bear the thought of throwing it away.

Suddenly, Sam second-guessed his certainty that blood-loss wouldn't matter here, whether they were leaving behind some of their souls, every time they painted their blood on the walls.

But that suddenly seemed like a much smaller issue than how the hell they were going to get out if they were both stuck inside.

• • •

_At least Prince Charming had a sword,_ Dean thought, clenching his eyes shut tight as he shuffled carefully forward. He had one arm out to the side, fingers splayed over brick and wood for an anchor to guide him along the tunnel, and the other stretched blindly out in front of him. He hoped he wouldn't actually touch anything with it until he reached the end of the tunnel, but picturing he had a machete in that hand helped him stand a little taller, move a little easier.

_Thorns aren't real,_ he reminded himself. _Smoke's not real. She's not here._

Knowing where she _was_ would have gone a long way toward easing his mind on that one. 

_"You and I will be together,"_ she'd said. _"We will become one. Why wouldn't you want that?"_ Like she couldn't fathom why the end of the world was a problem. Why having your soul swallowed up into a black cloud would bother someone.

But then he wondered how a soul eaten by Amara would fare compared to the souls being slowly nibbled to nothingness by the Soul Eater here.

_"No pain; no prayer; just bliss,"_ she'd said. _"That feeling you have when you're with me—for everyone, forever."_

It had to be better, didn't it? Better than whatever the kid with no arm and no heart and no eye was living back in the barn.

And in the dark, Dean imagined her cool fingertips on his cheek, brushing back to wrap soft around the back of his neck, remembered the way she drew him in for a kiss, and could almost feel her there with him.

It made it easier to walk forward blind through the nothing. And he hated that it made it easier.

"Just gotta get to the house," he mumbled out loud, to focus. "Get there, get painting, find Sam, and get out of here."

He fixed Sam in his mind, imagined him in the house in the real world, painting his sigil even now. _Get to Sammy,_ he thought again, like a mantra, and the phantom coolness of Amara's fingers faded. 

Part of him missed it.

_Get to Sam,_ he repeated.

• • •

Sam sat at the edge of the trap door and took three deep, steadying breaths. The fog had filled the tunnel below, now, so he was in for a blind drop.

All he needed to do was stay facing the same direction, and even if he couldn't see anything, the tunnel should lead back to the house. That had to be where Dean had gone from here. He'd shouted for him, and he'd searched the barn, feeling through the space for anything he couldn't see, and it was the only possibility left, as far as he could figure.

Finding Dean wouldn't deal with the problem of getting out, but at least they'd be together to work on it.

Sam held his breath, and left himself drop.

The white mist was dense enough that Sam could barely see his own hand stretched out in front of his face, or the wall he was hugging to stay oriented. He thought back to early mornings in San Francisco, when he and Jess had stayed out on the city too late and made their way to the bay to wait for the sun to come up over the Golden Gate Bridge, but even there he never remembered the fog being as thick as this. He could always see their joined hands between them, his feet below him, the dew-covered grass or damp pavement. This was a nightmare of fog, impossible and cloying.

"Dean?" Sam called through it, rather than linger on that thought. Linger on it too long and it would turn into the Cage, would turn back into frost and frozen breath and feathery down and disorientation. "Dean," he shouted, and wished he could hear it echo, rather than be swallowed in mist, "if you can hear me, I'm headed for the house." _I think,_ he amended silently.

_I hope._

Guilt gnawed at Sam's gut again. Maybe he'd brought this down on them, somehow; if he hadn't been imagining trapping Dean here to protect him, maybe this wouldn't have happened. Maybe he was reaping the karmic reward for his sins.

The last Soul Eater's words played through his mind, again, seductive with promise. _"I can keep you safe,"_ it had said, _"forever."_ But Amara evaporated angels with a brush of her fingers, sucked souls out through mouths like some kind of Dementor out of _Harry Potter_. What were the chances any place was truly safe from her?

And if it was, was that any better? Now that Sam had seen the husks of souls here, seen the hollow socket where an eye should have been, the even hollower eyes where some spark of life should have been, nausea rose in his almost-belly. What if, in wanting to save his brother from the Darkness, he'd condemned him to being eaten away into nothingness, instead? Condemned them both?

Heaven had felt wrong and false and spiteful, but now that their options seemed down to Billie ejecting them into the endless nothing, the Darkness with whatever she would bring, and being eaten away slowly until they slipped into some kind of half-alive coma here in this shadowland, a tiny, aching part of Sam wondered if they'd have been better off staying dead in the echo that passed for paradise, one of the dozens of forgotten times they'd landed there before.

A tiny, aching part of Sam wished they'd given up.

"No rest for the wicked," Sam murmured into the fog and put the thought away. 

There was a job to do—there was always a job to do—and the existential dread would have to wait until it was done.

• • •

Dean's fingers slipped off the brick and into air, and he opened his eyes. He'd expected to find the tunnel end with just a trapdoor overhead, but he'd stumbled instead into some kind of cellar.

The spirits were thick here. He'd brushed through and against a few uncomfortably gelatinous figures in the tunnel but had kept his eyes closed rather than risk getting tangled in the briars again. But here in the cellar, he saw he was surrounded by the ash-and-coal figures. Most of the spirits were cracked like pottery and more were missing pieces than not. 

Unlike the shadow in the barn, most of the things in the cellar faced him. They didn't speak or seem to see him, exactly—waving a hand in front of a face didn't so much as earn him a blink—but he got the sense that some of them at least felt the change of him coming in. 

Maybe they were like moths drawn to a match. 

Or maybe they were waiting. Waiting for him to free them.

"Working on it," he said under his breath and started moving awkwardly through the mass of spirits. He scanned the ceiling for a trap door, searched for the ladder or stairs or however people had gotten in and out of the cellar in life. 

Dean was just wrapping one hand around a ladder rung when he heard a sound—faint, blurred by the distance or something else—but a sound that he knew he'd be able to hear from beyond the grave, from under the ocean, from across spiritual planes or impossible distance.

_"Dean!"_

"Sam?" 

Desperation made Dean look up first, a hope that Sam was up in the house, in the _real_ house, painting sigils, but when Sam called his name again, he knew the sound was coming from behind him.

From the tunnel.

"Sammy!" he shouted, panic starting to rise in his gullet. If Sam was hurt, if Sam needed him... Dean began shoving through the spirits unceremoniously, not slowing down even when his hand went through a shoulder instead of along it, wiping the slick residue it left behind off on his jeans. "Lemme through," he growled, but the spirits seemed to crowd in tighter the more active he was, the louder.

_Moths to a match,_ he thought again. Drawn to signs of life, now that they were almost out of their own.

Reluctantly, Dean shut up and slowed down, trying to shift through the creatures more slowly. He leaned onto his toes every few steps, trying to peer over them and into the tunnel beyond, but it was either too dim or the unreal smoke was filling over the space again, and all he could see was dark. And everywhere he felt hands on him, the soft press of half-real shapes reluctant to let him pass. He thanked—well, no one in particular, actually—that he wasn't claustrophobic, but the grip of fingers was still ratcheting tension up his spine. It was too reminiscent of moments in Hell, when the acheri would come for the scraps that were left over when Alastair was done with him for the night.

When he finally emerged, a few of them still hung onto him, pulled in his wake into the tunnel, but most fell still behind him in the cellar. He shrugged out of their grips, pretending it didn't leave his skin crawling even after the touch was gone.

He waited until he'd cleared a few yards before he risked calling for his brother again, though.

"Sam? You down here?"

He wished again for a machete. And maybe a torch. With fire. That he could apply to the black spores spreading across the walls again. Maybe it could burn away the black mist rising, too.

He hoped against hope Sam wasn't a hallucination, too.

"Dean!" It was Sam's voice, and the relief in it relaxed something in Dean's spine, automatic and soft. "I can't see anything, I'm—I think I'm heading your way, keep talking."

"Sure thing, Sam," Dean called, but glanced behind him to see if it was drawing much attention, just in case. The few of the less broken spirits who had followed him into the tunnel still looked interested, at least as far as they looked anything at all, but they seemed reluctant to get more than a few feet from the cellar, so Dean crept a little deeper into the tunnel. "You got that, uh, black smoke stuff?" It was beginning to sink from the ceiling, poison sinking through the earth.

"What?" Sam sounded confused. "No, white—mist. I can't see a damn thing, it's like one of those stupid haunted houses where they've got the fog machine working overtime."

Dean laughed a little, in spite of himself, drifting closer to Sam's voice unthinking. "Looks like, uh... From this end, looks like—" _Amara,_ he almost said, the laughter dying. He scraped for another answer to cover it. "...Like smoke from a forest fire or something. Really dark. Mold on the walls."

There was a silence Dean deemed judgy before Sam repeated, "Mold? You're scared of mold?"

"What?" he snapped, defensive. "I'm not afraid of it, it's just there. Nasty black mold; the kind that'll kill you. Anyway, don't judge me, fog machine."

The dark was sinking closer, and Sam's laugh felt like light. Dean ducked, trying to see under the dense and rippling spread of it, into the gloom ahead.

"Well, good news, Sam, can't see any mist from here, so I bet it's gonna break soon. Not that the smoke's any better." He imagined their two ethers meeting in the middle, and wondered if they'd blur together into grey, or butt up against one another, or tangle and swirl together into a twist of black and white.

"Not sure it's gonna work that way," Sam called, and Dean knew he was close now. 

He couldn't hunch any lower and still walk, so he took a deep breath and stood up into the black, but stretched his arms out wide to span as much of the tunnel as he could. Wouldn't do to let Sam accidentally go right past him.

"Why not?" Dean asked, just to keep Sam talking.

"Well, it's just..." Sam began, and the uneasiness in his tone was infectious. "It's just, we might be carrying it with us."

Something about that made Dean's skin crawl. The thought that they could find one another and still not see, that they could be somehow trapped in the same place but in separate worlds, was too much to look at.

"Maybe it's like a boggart," Dean offered, trying to budge the feeling. "Maybe getting in the same place'll confuse it and it won't be able to do both at once."

"...Dude, did you just make a _Harry Potter_ reference?"

_Shit._ "Not my fault if I absorb some of your geek crap," Dean tried, but it sounded weak even as he said it. 

Anyway, it also wasn't his fault if they'd played all the movies back-to-back on cable one day and he hadn't changed the channel.

He couldn't see anything, anymore, as surrounded by the impenetrable dark as he had been when Amara had first emerged. "So much for just seeing each other's dead bodies, huh?"

"Yeah..."

"I mean, I got that, too," he admitted, Sam's lifeless body still swinging in the back of his mind, "but this one's working harder. Maybe it's more creative than that bastard in Michigan. Or it's been bored waiting for fresh meat."

"Or hungrier," Sam replied, and Dean paused, because it sounded like Sam wasn't more than an arm's length away.

"Sam?" Dean tried, quieter, reaching one hand forward through the cloud, wiggling his fingers.

"Here, Dean," Sam said, sounding relieved, and then he felt something realer than the background bump against his fingertips. Dean pushed forward until he had Sam's hand in a vise grip, then hauled him in close enough to thump his shoulder, relieved at his solidity. He still couldn't see his brother's outline until he was practically in his arms.

Sam gripped him tight by the shoulder for a moment then pulled back, squinting at him. "Can barely see you."

"Right? This shit's terrible, I told you."

"I'm still in fog," Sam said, alarmed.

Dean cursed inwardly. "Hey, it's no problem," he said, all false bravado. "Tunnel's straight, we can make it back to the cellar with our eyes closed if we have to. Already did it once." He shifted to Sam's side, but kept an arm slung loose around his shoulder, rather than risk losing him in their separate swallowing worlds. "And maybe it'll still get tired out or confused from trying to mess with us both at once."

"Worked on the boggart," Sam said, carefully neutral, and Dean scowled to keep from grinning. 

Dean reached his free hand out to the side of the tunnel to keep oriented and started guiding them back toward the cellar, for a destination.

"So," Sam said.

"So," Dean agreed.

"We're both inside the nest."

"Looks like it." Dean nodded, shuffling forward.

He could feel Sam nodding, too. "Any ideas on how to get out?"

Dean shrugged a shoulder. "Hope another hunter realizes we're missing and comes along before we're braindead. Pray," he added, and meant it ironically, but it sounded a little too soft when it came out.

Sam laughed joylessly.

Dean thumped his shoulder in an approximation of comfort. "Or you'll come up with something. Put that big brain to use." 

He looked up, trying to make eye contact, to just be solid for Sam, but when Sam returned the look, Dean felt a jolt deep in his belly.

"What?" Sam asked, alert, searching his face, but then looked stricken. "Dean, you..."

They were close enough now that even through the smoke Dean could see that Sam was paler than he should be, with dark circles around his eyes, fine cracks spreading all over his skin where it was visible. His mouth was black as soot. He looked like he'd been shattered and glued back together again, multiple times, the scars of the damage never quite healing. Some of the lines were dark, like pitch had been smeared in to fill in the cracks.

He remembered Cass saying he'd seen Sam's soul, after the Cage, that it looked like it had been flayed alive. Dean guessed this wasn't bad, considering, but he still looked away.

And Sam's haunted expression told him everything he needed to know about the marks that must be left behind on his own soul.

"I bet I look like hell," he said, wry, and pushed onward.

• • •

Hell was right.

Up this close, the fog couldn't do much to blur the space between their faces, and Dean really did look awful. He was rail thin, and his veins were standing out vivid on the surface. His usually absurdly perfect hair was too long and scraggly, his bright eyes dim and filmed over. There was skin missing in patches, and Sam looked away from a hole in his brother’s cheek that showed through to his teeth. He gripped the hand Dean had wrapped over his shoulder, and could feel bone.

"You look like Tutenkhamen," he said, rather than admit to being rattled.

"Really?" Dean sounded perplexed. "You just look halfway to these guys."

"So do you," Sam said, patiently. "Like something we'd dig up in a graveyard. Skin and bones."

"Unh-uh. Like souls in hell," Dean corrected. "Ashy and cracked. _Leaking._"

Sam blinked, tightening his grip on Dean's bony hand and forcing himself to keep looking straight ahead, into the mist. After a long moment, he said, "Maybe…. Maybe we're seeing what we expect to see. Like—maybe the human mind can't comprehend the soul any more than it can comprehend the true face of demons or angels or Heaven or Hell."

"Looking through a filter," Dean mused. "I tell ya, I'd rather it was one of those cat-ear, sparkly Snapchat filters than this _Hellraiser_ shit."

"No kidding," Sam said, hollowly. _Famine,_ he thought. _Prisoners of war._ "Gotta find a way to get these people out of here."

"And us," Dean agreed, but Sam thought he didn't sound very hopeful. "Though maybe—" He cut himself off, and Sam knew better than to ask him to finish.

He knew what Dean was thinking, anyway; maybe compared to what awaited them all on earth, this wasn't so bad.

The guilt was rising again, and with their souls on display, Sam wished he could be scrubbed clean. "At the last nest," he admitted, in quiet confession, "the Soul Eater said—he said he could keep you safe from Her. If I went in, too."

"Sam," Dean said, like a warning, "I swear, if you came in here with me on purpose—"

"Jesus, Dean, no! I just—it was just on my mind, that's all." 

Dean relaxed beside him. Sam heard him sigh.

"He might’ve been lying." Sam shrugged a shoulder. "Anyway, we'll still have our souls eaten here, just slower."

"Amara—" Dean started, stopped again, like he was tripping on what he wanted to say. Sam waited, let him go at his own pace. After a long moment, Dean tried again, quiet, like he was trying not to be overheard. "Amara said the people she ate, they—they stayed inside her forever. But no pain."

Sam thought he heard shame and maybe something that sounded like longing in Dean's voice.

Maybe Dean had been as drawn to the idea of Amara's eternity to escape the Soul Eater as Sam had been to the Soul Eater to escape Amara. He couldn't help but laugh.

"Out of the Darkness and into the nest," he said, wry. "We really know how to get into it, don't we?"

Dean laughed, too. And Sam thought, well, at least they were in it together.

• • •

It seemed like an hour had passed by the time they'd gotten through the tunnel and the mass of souls crowded into the cellar. At least the fog broke when they were crowded by spirits. He tried calling for Harvey once or twice, wondering what kind of shape the other hunter would be in by now, but none of the spirits responded. Sam joked they should keep an eye out for ghost trucker caps and ghost flannel, and Dean privately thought that might not be a bad way to find a hunter in a spirit realm.

Up inside the house, Dean used his knife to cut both their arms so they could paint the sigil on a wall together. He'd offered to paint it himself while Sam stood watch, but Sam had gotten jumpy about that and wouldn't explain why. Dean watched him, after that, but didn't pry.

Neither had much hope that the corresponding symbol would be painted out in the real world anytime soon, but doing something felt better than sitting around twiddling their thumbs, waiting. At least they were laying the table for the Soul Eater to be killed eventually, even if it might be too late for them when—if—it happened. And though he'd never let himself say something so gooey out loud, most things were worth doing if he was doing them with Sam, even if they involved getting a little beat up in the process.

"Wish we could just beat the shit out of it," he confessed. 

"Would certainly have been more straightforward," Sam admitted, half a smile on his blackened mouth. 

The dark stain made Dean think of Oreos, and he couldn't place why, at first. When he did, he started chuckling.

"What?" Sam asked, bumping their shoulders together.

"You remember that time Dad was gone for a week, and—"

"—Which time?" Sam interrupted, a little sour.

"Haha, let me get there, smartass." He nudged Sam in the ribs with an elbow. "One of the times I had to go get us groceries while he was gone, but I hadn't, uh, really nailed that whole budgeting and nutrition thing yet?"

"You still haven't," Sam teased, and Dean rolled his eyes but he was suppressing a grin.

"Oreos," he said quickly, before Sam could interrupt again. "When I got us that family-size bag. And a gallon of milk."

Sam cringed theatrically. "For dinner."

"For dinner!" 

"We got so sick," Sam lamented, but he was laughing, now, too.

"Right? You were covered in chocolate, man, looked like you'd been sucking on a tailpipe. Damn, I could go for some Oreos right now."

"Dude, you don't even have a stomach," Sam argued, "how can you possibly be hungry?"

Dean frowned. He hadn't thought of that. "Guess that is a little weird," he admitted, but shrugged it off. "Oreos are still good even when you're not hungry, though."

"I haven't been able to eat them since then," Sam said, and if he weren't so ashen, Dean would have thought he looked a little green around the gills.

"You're kidding me."

Sam shook his head.

"That's crazy. How can you not eat _Oreos_?"

"What? You haven't been able to eat—what was it—butter-pecan ice cream?" Sam asked, nudging Dean out of his way to join the two sides of the circle. "Since you ate so much of it you threw up."

Even without a stomach, Dean's stomach turned. "I thought I told you never to mention that again."

Sam shrugged. "You started it."

Dean made a point of grumbling. "Yeah, yeah." He let Sam finish joining the circle, then he used his own blood to join the points of the sharp V through the center. The sigil lit up in a soft glow, and he pumped a fist, triumphant.

"Lot easier with the diagram," Sam said, gesturing at Dean’s wrist and sounding relieved, but he was looking at the cut bleeding sluggishly on the back of his arm.

Dean pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket without thinking and wrapped it over the cut.

Sam watched him quietly, while he tied the bandanna securely in place, and when Dean was done, he was still looking at the spot. "Dean..." 

"Yeah, Sam?"

"Is that... d’you think that's part of our souls we just left behind on the wall?"

Ah. "That why you got weird about letting me do it?" 

Sam shrugged and didn't look up, so Dean looked at the wall instead, considering. "I guess... Not much else it could be. Maybe just like... I dunno, energy or something," he tried. He didn't really believe it, but he figured it was worth trying to get Sam to believe it.

From the look on Sam's face, he didn't think it had worked, though.

"Did you mean it?" Sam asked, now looking at Dean's arm and fishing in his own pockets.

"Mean what?"

"About praying."

Dean tilted his head side to side, considering. "Not really. Doesn't seem like God's listening, and Cass is M.I.A. Couldn't hurt to try, though, I guess."

"Maybe—if this is outside of time and space," Sam ventured, "maybe it'd reach them when they are listening? Were listening... Will be listening?"

Dean didn't think Sam much believed that, either, but he nodded anyway. "Sure, could work." And anyway, doing something always felt better than doing nothing. "You take His Supreme Douchiness and I'll take Cass."

Sam gave him one of those we-are-not-amused faces. "I'm guessing he probably wouldn't respond to 'His Supreme Douchiness,' Dean."

"And that's why you're trying him instead of me. Get praying, kid."

• • •

Dean didn't seem willing to let Sam out of his sight, which he guessed was wise with the way the place played tricks on them. And anyway, it seemed like the Soul Eater really wasn't getting as far with its mind games when they were together. Mist had bled in from under doors here and there, and he'd caught Dean eyeing the ceiling more than once, but the signs of Hell that weren't printed on their bodies seemed to be keeping their distance since they'd found one another.

Maybe Dean was right about the boggart thing. The place even felt a little warmer while they were elbow-to-elbow and laughing about getting sick on junk food.

With no furniture, they'd settled down on the stairs to pray, wedged into the too-narrow space side-by-side. Dean had started out praying to Cass aloud until Sam had reminded him he was using his outdoor voice. He got an elbow to the ribs for his trouble, but at least Dean quieted down enough that Sam could think his prayers, after that.

Sam pictured a clean piece of stationary and a good pen, pictured writing out his prayers in neat letters and in complete sentences, drafting them as careful and cogent arguments for the greater good and gentle appeals to whatever personal relationship they might have. He flattered. He pleaded. He begged.

After one too many spirited arguments in an ethics course junior year, Jess had teased that Sam must think in paragraphs. He figured he might be out of practice these days, but he dug for his best.

When he finished, and Dean still had his forehead resting on his steepled knuckles, he wondered what Dean's prayers looked like when Sam couldn't hear them. He imagined them angry; he imagined them soft.

Sam closed his eyes again, and mouthed _"please"_ against his fingers. Just, _"Please. Anyone. Please."_

Dean sighed beside him. Sam looked up, ready to give him a small smile, ready to say something like, "Now we wait, I guess," but before he could open his mouth, Dean was gone.

• • •

"Now we wait, I guess," Dean said, but Sam was gone.

Or maybe Dean was. It was too dark to see anything, but he couldn't feel Sam's weight against his side, almost fell over from having been braced against him without realizing.

Everything was darkness. He heard rain; he heard thunder.

He didn't hear Sam.

"Sam!" he shouted, standing to squint into the gloom. The darkness around him was thick, thicker than just a lack of light, thicker than a storm cloud, it was—

_Oh._

_Darkness._

There were fingers, cool, on his cheek, slipping over his throat, around the back of his neck.

"Amara?" he whispered. He couldn't see her, couldn't see anything, but he knew, somehow, knew it was her, _felt_ it was her.

**Yes, Dean.**

He closed his eyes, felt her voice inside his head, reached shaking hands up for where he felt her hands on his body. His fingers closed around fingers, a little wet and unfinished but there.

"You came," he said, or thought he did; he couldn't hear his voice over the sound of the storm. 

**I heard your prayer.**

From the inside, her voice was like molasses, like melted chocolate, like everything someone thought they meant when they said a voice was dark and rich, but only because they hadn't heard this. It felt like melting. It felt like it was in his blood, blurring every line away between him and—and everything. Between him and nothing.

He tried to argue he hadn't prayed to her; tried to say he'd prayed to Cass, prayed to God, prayed to anyone who would listen, but he could see her face still in his mind and knew it was a lie. He'd been as good as praying to her most of the time he'd been in this place, every wisp of smoke carrying her through his thoughts, every half-eaten soul leaving him half-wishing she were there to finish the job quicker and cleaner than the thing they'd come to hunt.

**They'll be part of me forever,** she soothed.

And he hated it, but he was soothed.

"Can you get us out of here?" he asked, pleading. "Just get me and Sam out and you can have all the rest."

Lips brushed his, felt like water, like raindrops on his face. **I would never let him keep you from me.**

"Sam?" Dean asked, alarmed. "Or the Soul Eater?"

But then he lurched awake in his body with no answer.

• • •

Sam tore down the stairs and through the house, dropped himself through the trapdoor to the cellar without even bothering with the ladder. He shouted for Dean, but it only brought the spirits closer, crowding against him in a mass of limbs like leather and paper. He waded through them like he was pushing into a river, pressed through them where they were insubstantial and between them where they were solid.

There was a sound full of rage behind him, only half-real but immense, like a dream of a hurricane, and when he looked back there was the Soul Eater, nebulous black robes with little inside them as far as Sam could tell. The spirits seemed to fall dead or unconscious as it touched them, so it was gaining on Sam faster than Sam was reaching the tunnel.

Sam shouted louder for Dean, hoped against hope that his brother could hear him through the gale, and shoved harder to get away from the Soul Eater. But ahead of him, over the heads of the spirits, Sam could see the tunnel, saw something spilling toward him like a wave, a column of purple-black smoke, and he froze.

A spirit in the tunnel turned toward the encroaching dark and Sam thought that in that split-second, she looked peaceful, like there was last glimmer of light in her glassy eyes. Then she dissolved into the dark mass of it like water. Spirits were falling behind him and being swallowed in front of him.

Sam closed his eyes and thought of Dean.

_"Wherever you are,"_ he thought, _"I hope I'm on my way there."_

• • •

Dean wasn't even up off of the ground yet when he flipped his knife open and cut into his palm. He staggered up to his feet and up against the wall, beginning to paint the sigil right over the ghost of it he'd left behind in his soul's blood in the nest. There was no time to waste. Sam's body might be alive, but if Amara got to his soul before the nest could eject its occupants, it wouldn't matter.

That wrong feeling was on him, the crawling sense of cold and sickness seeping in through his skin. The Soul Eater knew about the threat and would be fighting back; there was a clatter in the distance—the shed door swinging open hard enough to bounce back, he guessed.

"Comin', Sammy," Dean muttered, digging deeper into the cut in his palm and painting faster. Though he was pretty sure that that was Sammy's body coming for him. It just wouldn't be Sam wearing it.

Dean hissed as splinters from the old wood dug his fingers, but he didn't slow down. He prayed out loud, begging Amara to leave Sam alone, to take the kid made of almost nothing inside her instead, and leave his brother's cracked and battered soul for just a little longer.

He thought of Sam's body lurching toward the barn like Frankenstein's monster, imagining the Soul Eater having a hard time piloting something so big and gangly, and grinned in spite of the danger. "Hope you trip on his big feet, bastard," he mumbled, and finished the circle. There was a flash of angry red light, and a heavy thud on the distance, and the cold evaporated into nothing.

• • •

Sam woke up in the grass, halfway between the shed and the barn, sucking air into lungs that burned but expanded when he told them to. He heard his pulse hammering in his ears, wet and thundering, curled his fingers into the earth, and was dizzy with relief when he could feel the fine grains of the red clay soil get under his nails, real and solid and damp. He would have kissed the ground, but he needed to get up to his knees, to his feet, get to the barn, see if Dean had woken up, too, find him, make sure he was okay—

Dean skidded to a halt beside him, landing hard on his knees, and then Sam was falling into a hug so fierce it was hard to breathe, but he didn't care. The barn door was still swaying on its hinges in the distance.

"Is it—"

"Dead."

Sam sighed, shaky relief. "Good. How'd—I was in the shed—"

Dean laughed, breathless, mashing his hair with a wet palm, smearing what Sam assumed was blood over his forehead. "Soul Eater tried to wear you to come after me, think you were a couple sizes too big for it." 

"Ha ha."

"You okay?" Dean asked, casual tone not coming off even a little convincingly, and Sam closed his eyes, leaned into his chest just a little. 

"Yeah. Yeah, Dean, I'm okay." He gave his arm a reassuring squeeze. "You?"

"Yeah. Yeah, fine."

Sam didn't believe that, either, but it wasn't worth a fight. The Soul Eater was gone, they were both alive, and more or less in one piece. That was enough.

• • •

Dean couldn't manage to tell Sam what had happened, not exactly, said something vague about one of his prayers coming through and waking up in his body. Sam gave him dewy, puppy-dog eyes and long, concerned looks, so Dean cranked up the radio and Sam didn't push after that.

_"...she walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns; 'Come in,' she said, 'I'll give ya shelter from the storm..."_

"Thought you hated Dylan," Sam complained, over the harmonica, because he was obligated.

"What?" Dean snorted. "Everybody likes Dylan. Even you like Dylan."

"Yeah, and I _distinctly_ remember you telling me I shouldn't because he was 'whiny and bitter.'"

Dean remembered that, too. "Never happened, man, you're crazy. Dylan's a genius."

Sam rolled his eyes, gave him one of those patented no-patience, fuck-you looks, and Dean grinned. For the moment, at least, everything felt right with the world. They drove on, quiet except for the radio and the engine humming beneath them.

_"It's a never-ending battle for a peace that's always torn..."_

They'd deal with Amara tomorrow. Today, they could drive into the sunset together like it was the last night on earth, and that would be enough. It would have to be.

• • •

_"If I could only turn back the clock, to when God and Her were born; 'Come in,' she said, 'I'll give ya shelter from the storm.'"_


End file.
